[spoiler]“Your wife has been shot in the shoulder while going on some tour in Morocco. You can get to a city where there is a “Western” hospital 3 hours away, or take a chance on a town a half-hour away that might have a doctor of unknown quality. What do you do?”
Give her basic first aid, wash the wound, examine it, and make a decision then. Since she suffered a shoulder shot, the odds of her dying, especially with basic first aid given, in the 2.5 hour window between getting to the iffy town and the certain hospital are very low if she survives the first half-hour. Face it: if the bullet struck her heart or an artery, she’s dead anyway. So go to the Western hospital.
Note that as the movie progressed, the obvious choice would’ve been the correct one as she did not receive medical treatment until after the three hour window had passed.[/spoiler]
I just got back from seeing this film tonight and I have to say I agree with this 100%. By the time the film was half over I couldn’t help but think it was one of the most pretentious films I’ve ever seen, plus it was pointless and about an hour too long. What did the Japanese girl’s storyline even have to do with the film? So her dad gave the guy the gun a few years ago. And? That plot could have been interesting on it’s own but stuffed in with everything else I just kept waiting for there to be some kind of meaningful connection. Too many scenes that dragged on and on with nothing happening. And so we find out at the end that the children storyline took place that day after Blanchett’s character was already brought to the hospital. So? Is that supposed to mean something? Doesn’t that make the housekeeper’s decision to take the kids across the border even dumber considering that she knew the wife had been shot?
Okay, well, I’m not expecting to change anyone’s mind on this, and I felt a lot of things could be done differently, but I figured that the bad decisions everyone made were rather the point; that they all tied in some way back to lack of communication, starting with Brad Pitt’s very first bad bad decision to take the high-strung Blanchett to Morocco (reflecting bad communication with his wife).
The sentiment that one would have to be retarded to leave one’s kids with an illegal immigrant is silly. I know people with just the same relationship as the Mexican woman had with the kids - it’s quite possible the childcare connection had been there for years and years, and there was really a (perceived by involved parties) rapport between the nurse and family. Trust can come from knowing (or thinking you know) someone, not always cold-calculated musings on their fitness and legal status. And that, along with Pitt’s decision to make her stay and her decisions afterward were grounded in communication issues, just not in an obvious “he didn’t understand what I just said” way.
I didn’t really understand the nurse’s decision to leave the children either (other than the obvious “I seriously can’t carry them any longer and I’ve gotta do something…” hell, I guess that was it). But taking them across was sort of understandable - it’s not like the wedding could ever happen again, despite Pitt’s flippant offer. And Gael went nuts fairly quickly. The whole second part of all the stories became a kneejerk-reaction thing.
…and such. I’m not going to sit around trying to defend every decision in the movie, I’m not the director. But it’s easy to call people stupid from one’s armchair. These were human decisions, made spur-of-the-moment, under stress or excitement, and the characters were never made out to be particularly great or smart. Since when does every normal person have to pass the preparedness, coolheadedness and likeability test in order for a movie to be good? Seems like movies where all the characters are like that would come off as pretty fake. And I believe that the nature of the decisions were meant to tie the movie together more than the actual events were meant to, hence the Japan story (more internal and abstract than the other stories, which I think was needed, and it’s cute that that type of story would be the Japanese one, I guess).
As these people weren’t heroes or villains, I didn’t see the director putting a huge sense of worth in their actions, so I didn’t take it so much as pretentious. It gave me the same feeling as Curb Your Enthusiasm (but not as hyperbolic) - really painful. A sort of “This is where we are, just like the movie title. We’re lacking in the harmony and order department and sometimes we suffer for it.” I’m curious - is a statement like that not good enough for you, or do you not agree with it?
I just saw this flick last night and I liked it. I agree with those who say it was about people making dumb choices, but that’s what a lot of life is made of.
I didn’t think Cate Blanchette was in it long enough to deserve a nomination for her acting. Also, I didn’t see her as OCD in the slightest. She struck me as a rather privileged American who is used to a completely different level of cleanliness in her life and was reacting to the reduced level of hygeine that exists in much of the rest of the world. I know a LOT of people who would have behaved the same way.
As far as her comment regarding “dragging her to” Morocco, that scene, to me, was an illustration of how out-of-touch they were with each other. Did he actually think she’d enjoy trekking through the desert of a mostly third-world country? I mean, if I were trying to reconnect with my spouse, I’d try to pick a place that offered him less distraction from the task at hand.
My favorite scene was when the old woman gave her a couple hits off the opium pipe (though the fact that they didn’t do that before they stitched her up is a gaping hole in the film, in my opinion).
I thought the Japanese girl’s performance was very good. She expressed her soul-crushing loneliness so well. However, I think if I was her father, I’d have tossed my overcoat on her before I gave her the hug she so desperately needed. :eek:
All in all, I thought it was a good, if flawed, movie.
Exactly! Honestly, I can’t believe there were twenty-some posts on this without anybody mentioning that. The title is Babel, after all.
If you look carefully the movie is a virtual catalogue of ways in which people do communicate and are liable to miscommunicate and the devastation that can wreak. In fact it’s sort of fun to go back and pick them out individually.
Viridiana, I like every one of your points, you said them better than I could. And I particularly want to reiterate that while there were a handful of horrible decisions driving the plot, in *real life * most of us do not behave remotely as rationally as we would as spectators in a movie theater. Would that we did. There was only one unforgivable idiot that I could see. The rest I would file under the category of “flawed” – i.e. human.
The one question I had (other than what was in the note at the end), is how do you explain the miscommunication between Amelia and - I forget his character’s name - Brad Pitt? When you hear the call from her side he tells her she has to watch the kids, and she complains she has to go to her son’s wedding. When you see it from his point of view he says he’s found somebody to wtch the kids and she thanks him. What are we supposed to take away from that?
I just rented it and am prepared for…well, for the worst, based on having read this thread. I hope I don’t come to find out that all the characters took Stupid Lessons from the characters in House of Sand and Fog.
The Saturday before the Oscars I watched Little Miss Sunshine and The Departed since I had heard they were the odds on favorites to win best picture. I thought Little Miss Sunshine was the biggest pile of steaming crap I have ever seen, and The Departed was too obviously flawed to have won Best Picture. A week later I saw Babel. Halfway through I thought, “This got robbed.”
I’d be more shocked at the responses you’ve gotten if this weren’t the Dope, where many semi-intelligent people come to boast about how intelligent they are. Of course Dopers would have made the right choice in every situation and known exactly what to do. For example, when your wife has been shot in the neck while you are in a foreign non-western country:
Of course that’s what we would all be thinking. I know if it were me, I’d sit there, calmly flushing her wound with the Evian I took from French tourists thinking, “Well, I love her, and I could take her to the nearest doctor, but the nearest hospital is only 150 miles further away. If she dies during that 180 mile trek while I continue to give her shoddy first aide, eh, oh well. From what I’ve gathered reading the internet and that CPR course I took a year ago, she’d likely have died anyway.” Truly, that would be my first reaction. Pah to the Brad Pitt character and his decision to get her to the nearest doctor in a town with a phone with which he could call the US Embassy to send in a MASH unit. What a maroon.
That did sound a lot more like what someone would do if they were sitting at a computer reading about it than if it actually happened.
Another thing to remember: the nanny was not in the country illegally, she was employed illegally. So if “something came up” that required her to interact with the police, she would not have to be afraid of getting arrested or deported.
And she’d been their nanny since they were infants.
this debate reminds me exactly of what it was like talking to people after Contact came out.
I admit I wasnt surprised that alot of people didnt get it but damn did it have to be 95% of the population who was to stupid to figure out that it was about FAITH and not friggin aliens and crap?
I don’t think the nanny was an illegal alien, she was just working illegally. If she had been completely illegal crossing into mexico for a wedding would just be beyond stupid. Not to mention the way she tried to come back. They expected no trouble at the border, she couldn’t have been living in the US illegally.
I thought it was a GREAT movie. I didn’t sense any pretentiousness. Bad decisions? Perhaps the maid going to Mexico with the kids. But even that was understandable. She was like their mother, perhaps even closer to them than their mother. And even leaving them by a bush in the desert was a fine decision. That was the ONLY chance that the kids had at survival. They had no food or water. They absolutely needed to find some help. And making them walk around in the heat would’ve killed them.
There’s getting it, and then there’s caring about it. *Babel * isn’t hard to get, it’s just that once it was got I didn’t care.
People have trouble communicating? No shit. Really? Whoa. Three hours of my life drained by this psychic leech of a movie, never to be returned, sacrificed on the tear-smeared altar of some douche whose sole objective is to apparently create a supporting pastiche for that Gustavo Santaolalla track that was better used years ago by Mann in The Insider, all of this so that I can be told something I already know: people are all interconnected, and could be communicating more effectively with one another…
…and if anyone found that message new or profound, then I just don’t know what to say. Seriously. God bless. Thanks for taking the night off from the monster truck rally or Wheel of Fortune to come on down to this lil ol’ place we call the “cinema.” Yep, for sure, we’re pushing the boundaries here tonight.
Babel is fully gotten. It’s just that it’s a blase piece of vaguely socially-conscious crap that doesn’t say anything I care about. It’s an internal human resources film on how we should all try harder to get along better, writ large and excruciatingly long by a director with a good eye and actors worth their pay. Message received; interest factor: zero. Pretension: thick. Scenery: pretty. Target audience: vaguely left-wing guilt addicts, people that have never seen Shortcuts, those that think a director with a Mexican last name makes a film edgy in an artistic way, and the Academy. Wait, that was redundant. Disregard and strike last.
That’s an interesting critique. I haven’t actually seen a movie that had a “message” that was “new,” so I guess I cut it a little more slack. You know, if you want to send a message…
I liked the characters. I thought they were belivable and seemed like real people, and I didn’t know which of them were going to be alive at the end. If you didn’t like it, you didn’t like it, but it really wasn’t that bad.
Wel I have to ask why the trio you mentioned specifically deserve your invective. And I should also add that it will be a long time before I see a better edit reason than added Tony Curtis.
Acting: good
Locations and set design: good
Pacing: problematic. It suffers from Seemingly-Endless-Tracking-Shot-itis. Two examples: the Japanese dance club and the Mexican wedding dance scenes.
Characters’ behavior: the nanny: stupid, but so far not quite as stupid as her drunken idiot of a nephew. However, I hear she gets worse. I’ll brace myself.
Brad n’ Cate:
She has no OCD. I wouldn’t drink the local water or use their ice cubes either. This is a common concern for travelers in far-flung places.
He had no business jeoparding a bus full of people and taking her to a shithole of a village whose “doctor” has dirty fingers.
Chieko: desperate for some attention and affection.